Meeting with the US-DBpedians – A Wrap-Up

One lightning event after the other. Just four weeks after our Amsterdam Community Meeting, we crossed the Atlantic for the third time to meet with over 110 US-based DBpedia enthusiasts. This time, the DBpedia Community met in Cupertino, California and was hosted at Apple Inc.

Main Event

First and foremost, we would like to thank Apple for the warm welcome and the hosting of the event.

After a Meet & Greet with refreshments, Taylor Rhyne, Eng. Product Manager at Apple, and Pablo N. Mendes, Researcher at Apple and chair of the DBpedia Community Committee, opened the main event with a short introduction setting the tone for the following 2 hours.

The main event attracted attendees with eleven invited talks from major companies of the Bay Area actively using DBpedia or interested in knowledge graphs in general such as Diffbot, IBM, Wikimedia, NTENT, Nuance, Volley and Stardog Union.

Tommaso Soru – University of Leipzig

Tommaso Soru (University of Leipzig), DBpedia mentor in our Google Summer of Code (GSoC) projects, opened the invited talks session with the updates from the DBpedia developer community. This year, DBpedia participated in the GSoC 2017 program with 7 different projects including “First Chatbot for DBpedia”, which was selected as Best DBpedia GSoC Project 2017. His presentation is available here.

DBpedia likes to thank the following poeple for organizinga nd hosting our Community Meeting in Cupertino, California.

Invited Talks- A Short Recap

Filipe Mesquita (Diffbot) introduced the new DBpedia NLP Department, born from a recent partnership between our organization and the California based company, which aims at creating the most accurate and comprehensive database of human knowledge. His presentation is available here. Dan Gruhl (IBM Research) held a presentation about the in-house development of an omnilingual ontology and how DBpedia data supported this

Filipe Mesquita – Diffbot

endeavor. Stas Malyshev representative for Dario Taraborelli (both Wikimedia Foundation) presented the current state of the structured data initiatives at Wikidata and the query capabilities for Wikidata. Their slides are available here and here. Ricardo Baeza-Yates (NTENT) gave a short talk on mobile semantic search.

The second part of the event saw Peter F. Patel-Schneider (Nuance) holding a presentation with the title “DBpedia from the Fringe” giving some insights on how DBpedia could be further improved. Shortly after, Sebastian Hellmann, Executive Director of the DBpedia Association, walked the stage and presented the state of the art of the association, including achievements and future goals. Sanjay Krishnan (U.C. Berkeley) talked about the link between AlphaGo and data cleansing. You can find his slides here. Bill Andersen (Volley.com) argued for the use of extremely precise and fine-grained approaches to deal with small data. His presentation is available here. Finally, Michael Grove (Stardog Union) stressed on the view of knowledge graphs as knowledge toolkits backed by a graph data model.

Michael Grove – Stardog Union

The event concluded with refreshments, snacks and drinks served in the atrium allowing to talk about the presented topics, discuss the latest developments in the field of knowledge graphs and network between all participants. In the end, this closing session was way longer than had been planned.

GSoC Mentor Summit

Shortly after the CA Community Meeting, our DBpedia mentors Tommaso Soru and Magnus Knuth participated at the Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit held in Sunnyvale California. During free sessions hosted by mentors of diverse open source organizations, Tommaso and Magnus presented selected projects during their lightning talks. Beyond open source, open data topics have been targeted in multiple sessions, as this is not only relevant for research, but there is also a strong need in software projects. The meetings paved the way for new collaborations in various areas, e.g. the field of question answering over the DBpedia knowledge corpus, in particular the use of Neural SPARQL Machines for the translation of natural language into structured queries. We expect that this hot deep-learning topic will be featured in the next edition of GSoC projects. Overall, it has been a great experience to meet so many open source fellows from all over the world.

Upcoming events

After the event is before another ….

Connected Data London, November 16th, 2017.

Sebastian Hellmann, executive director of the DBpedia Association will present Data Quality and Data Usage in a large-scale Multilingual Knowledge Graph during the content track at the Connected Data in London. He will also join the panelists in the late afternoon panel discussionabout Linked Open Data: Is it failing or just getting out of the blocks? Feel free to join the event and support DBpedia.

A message for all DBpedia enthusiasts – our next Community Meeting

Currently we are planning our next Community Meeting and would like to invite DBpedia enthusiasts and chapters who like to host a meeting to send us their ideas to dbpedia@infai.org. The meeting is scheduled for the beginning of 2018. Any suggestions regarding place, time, program and topics are welcome!